Tag Archives: rackspace

The DevOps movement is rising, and an increasing number of IT professionals are keen to adopt this new way of working in order to achieve optimum collaboration between their Development and Operations departments. The ability to react quickly to customer demands is of top priority to businesses all over the world, and the benefits of DevOps is rapidly becoming widely known as offering fantastic business value.

The Ebook shares valuable insights from practicing DevOps leaders with a key focus on outlining the need for enhanced collaboration, measurement and sharing through all aspects of any business. The DevOps Mindset showcases unique perspectives, challenges and achievements, as well as the catalysts which led them to adopt a DevOps mindset.

By successfully balancing the technical and social side of your development and operational processes you can actively learn and advance much quicker to help achieve your company goals. An unequal development of both sides will result in automation without collaboration and a lack of thought into exactly how your ideas and services will effectively be available to your customers.

“To achieve true DevOps collaboration, you need your employees to really think and act as one, not just be merged together in name only. By pushing communication from the start, everyone gets a better feel for others’ needs and how they do their jobs.” Said James Kenigsberg, Chief Technology Officer at 2U, Inc.

This awesome Ebook shapes a Q&A format and delves deeper into how this new form of agile collaboration is sweeping its way through the software and IT industries.

You will also be able to take away useful tips for business leaders considering transforming their company culture towards a DevOps methodology.

We think this Ebook from Rackspace is a grade A piece, and an asset to anyone contemplating DevOps or thinking about adopting this innovative way of reaching new levels of productivity.

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What do you think – is Devops just a fad or is it here to stay? Well, Rackspace recently commissioned independent technology market research specialist Vanson Bourne to conduct this piece of research and answer that very question. 700 global technology decision-makers were surveyed and the study discovered that businesses are now recognising DevOps as an established industry with adoption figures soaring at an extraordinary rate. Companies are now seeing significant business value in implementing DevOps as part of their own everyday practices.

What was previously recognised as a niche domain and implemented by only a select few, is now seeing widespread adoption and considerably transforming the way IT is viewed across a huge range of industries.

61% of those surveyed, highlighted customer satisfaction as the key incentive for DevOps adoption, enabling businesses to deliver better value to their customers through technology, and improve inefficiency to reduce delivery time to the customer.

While utilising DevOps practices and setting clear business goals at the beginning of every project, 57% saw an increased customer conversion or satisfaction rate.

The official Adoption Study infographic highlights 66% of respondents have already implemented DevOps practices, and 79% of those who have not, plan to do so by the end of 2015.

It is clear DevOps is increasingly being recognised as delivering real business value. A massive 93% reported setting clear end goals for their DevOps initiatives, showing a definite focus on significantly improving customer satisfaction for a long-term positive impact on the business as a whole.

In a nutshell – DevOps allows businesses to consider the ways in which they organise and structure their company to initiate better ways of working. It creates opportunities for businesses to deliver better experiences to their customers faster, broaden the range of services they offer and better serve their business by using data more proactively.

A big thank you to the Rackspace Adoption Study for these incredible figures. It’s fantastic to see this industry expanding so rapidly, and we’re looking forward to seeing what the future holds in this space.

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Applications use session state. Whether session state should be used or not is a hot topic of debate, but lots of applications use session state – fact.

Recently, I was involved in troubleshooting a performance issue for a customer. As it turns out, their application was hammering session state into a Microsoft SQL Server Database. The web application was taking some fairly meaty load – 100,000’s page requests per hour spread across 15 or so web servers. When I dug into the detail with the development team it became clear that they’d used SQL Server as a session state provider because – and I quote; “We had nowhere else to put it”.

In Microsoft ASP.NET applications this is something I’ve seen quite often, but this time it got me thinking……storing session state in SQL server seems like using a sledge hammer to crack a nut, so I decided to take a look at some alternatives.

I wanted to look beyond the typical Session State Server solution and NoSQL databases seemed the obvious route. Some are perfectly designed for Session State (some are not) and it was logical that they’d make a great alternative. But which would be the best fit?

To start off I set some rules, I wanted the following;

The NoSQL database should be supported by a Session State provider which was already available. I don’t want to build one myself.

Performance is paramount. I want to pick the best performing provider.

After some quick searches on NuGet and Google I discovered a couple of Session State Providers for Couchbase, Redis, MemCached and RavenDb. That was easy; four options found pretty quickly. However, when I started to try and understand the best performing provider, I just couldn’t get a clear answer.

So which is the best performing session state provider for ASP.NET?

To answer this, I needed some hard evidence, but there’s not much out there apart from conjecture, so I decided to load test each provider and find out.

In this series of blog posts I thought it would be useful to share more than just the results of my test. So I’ll walk you through setting up each of the Session State Providers and their pre-requisites. However, since some of you won’t care about that, in the first post we’ll cut straight to the chase and look at the results.